Recent Severe Storms Not Unusual for The Area

BINGHAMTON — It was one week ago when severe weather came through Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania, and it ended up becoming a night a lot of people won’t forget.

Multiple counties were under tornado warnings and a total of four tornadoes actually touched down.

“It’s pretty crazy, scary, scary. I have kids and if they had been outside, it happened so quick,” Billie Jo Arner of Kingsley said.

Arner is one of many who saw first hand how destructive mother nature can be.

Many have wondered if this severe weather is sticking around.

One WNEP viewer wrote on Facebook: “I have never heard of so many tornadoes in Pennsylvania. What is going on?”

“Right now we’re in a pattern that, it’s a stormy pattern where we’re seeing more straight line winds and tornadoes,” Warning Coordination Meteorologist, David Nicosia said.

It’s not the first time where our area has seen a weather pattern bring multiple tornadoes in one day.

In 2010, there were seven tornadoes that hit Wayne, Pike and Susquehanna counties. One of them was an EF2 tornado.

Then there was 1998, when there were 19 tornadoes in our area in just three days. The tornadoes ranged from F0 to F3.

Two people were killed at Lake Carey. Dozens were left injured.

“A few years ago we were talking about all the floods and all the heavy rain. Well now, it seems to be more storm activity,” Nicosia said.

So far this year, the National Weather Service office in Binghamton has issued 12 tornado warnings throughout their coverage area.

Of those tornadoes, there have been at least nine confirmed tornadoes.

Thanks to better technology, the National Weather Service has been able to better predict the probability of a tornado forming.

Social media has also helped forecasters learn where exactly a tornado may have touched down.

“One of the tornadoes we did this past week in Central New York, we did not know about where that damage was until somebody told us about it on Facebook. So that would not have happened before. We’re finding out a lot more about what’s happening in our community than we ever knew before,” Erik Heden said.